


Chesapeake Hymnal

by disenchanted



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Episode: s03e07 Digestivo, Goodbye Sex, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Time and memory, the teacup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 18:03:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4401851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will and Hannibal bid each other farewell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chesapeake Hymnal

Two or three miles from the farm, Hannibal rested. He lay Will down beneath a snowbound white pine and tugged up the collar of Will’s jacket. The gesture echoed that of dressing a corpse; so Hannibal took Will’s cheeks in his hands to warm them, to feel that the blood flowed from the cut on the side of his face. Will’s heartbeat ran like a man running scared:  _thud-thud-thud-thud-stumble, stumble, thud-thud-thud-thud-stumble_.

Each footprint in the snow, Hannibal knew, marked a moment’s distance from the evening they had stood together and tossed his notes into the fire. Each footprint marked a door in the palace. When he looked back, he saw a line of footprints rolling into shadow and emerging from the glittering crest of a hill he had already crested. The snow was like the pillar of salt, scattered.

‘Will,’ Hannibal said, softly enough that Chiyoh would not hear him. ‘You can hear me: yes?’

The eyelids were still, the mouth pliant and dripping drool, but the heartbeat ran faster. Gently Hannibal opened Will’s eyes, and leant down so that their faces mirrored each other.

‘Yes,’ Hannibal told those bright, barren eyes. ‘You’ll regain control of your muscles in about an hour. Until then I’ll do the running.’

He closed Will’s eyes again; he hefted Will into his arms and felt how his shoulders strained, how his back bent. Sweat moistened his forehead, heat gathered in the crevices beneath his arms and between his legs. The cold midnight air raised gooseflesh.  The brand on his back burned like a beacon; he thought it must have been a light, a lamp Chiyoh could follow. He smelt her clean, hard scent behind him, pulling through the scent of the pine, the owls, the hares, the soil beneath the snow. Before him, faintly, he smelt asphalt and oil.

 

* * *

 

On either side of the highway bare oaks tangled together in the shadow. Blue moonlight poured through the narrow conduit of the road. Now and then high beams flashed out, prepossessing but incurious, then passed by. In the headlights of the car he had stolen, Hannibal saw the snow drive dizzily downwards, roll up, disperse. The asphalt before him was softened by an inch or two of untouched powder: what a pity, he thought, to make tracks. Why should the snow not bury the road, the trees? Why should the snow not rise to cover the moon? He thought of Marie and the archduke sledding down the mountainside, free.

There was only the sound of the engine running, the tires spinning: yet he heard In paradisum passing through the lips of twelve untouched young men, echoing against the fine white limestone of a 7th century abbey.  _Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere_ …

‘I remember the first winter we knew each other,’ Hannibal told Will, who lay spread out in the back seat, immobile but rocking softly with the car. ‘You were frightened: you were stumbling into the mouth of hell, and you scraped your palms away trying to climb out. Now you close your eyes. You spread your arms and fall as if you were soaring.

‘Do you remember the blizzard that year? We slept together as the snow fell—you in my arms, beneath the quilt, shivering. I rested with my lips against your forehead; I don’t know if you felt it. In the morning my first three patients called me to cancel their appointments. You clutched my shoulders. You told me not to go. You said, “If you leave, you may not be able to find me again. When you look away I can feel myself disappearing.” But I had never looked away: the eyes of my mind were always on you.’

Will said nothing: Hannibal heard only  _æternam habeas requiem_ , then the first few bars of the Variations’ aria, as if he were moving through centuries. The trees rested, strengthened, spread out their leaves; the leaves fell; snow coated the branches; and the snow melted, and soft buds dripped from the branches in its stead; and the buds unfurled into leaves, and the leaves fell. Blood poured from flesh; flesh slipped from bones; bones eased into the earth.

The Patapsco River was beneath them, moonlit, when Hannibal heard a rustle in the back seat. The rear-view mirror showed that Will’s fingers, limp against his stomach, were twitching. At once the Key Bridge seemed to lengthen till it was interminable: the shore ahead was a black shroud over the horizon.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Will struggled to ask.

‘Home,’ Hannibal said.

‘Not yours,’ Will muttered.

Hannibal said, ‘No, not mine,’ and looked ahead again, to where the hard yellow lights of the industrial outskirts glowed watchfully. The bridge sloped downhill, then ended; the road pulled to the right, skirting the city to which Dr. Lecter had, for twenty years, belonged.

 

* * *

 

By the light of a sole dim lamp Hannibal tuned the piano in the front room of Will’s house. The house was not as they had known it: the dogs’ scent remained, Will’s scent remained, but dust was thick on the fallboard of the piano, and the silence sounded somehow injured by the vibration of the wire. Hannibal was playing the first G of the aria. G, G, G…. (God, he thought, God, God, God.) He could not bring his left hand down to the third octave; neither could he bring his right hand up to the sixth. So he brought his right hand down an octave and played the final chord.

Behind Hannibal the bedclothes were stirring; a groan was pressed into the pillow; fingernails scratched at the cotton. Will groped at the mattress till he could lift himself up. Diffuse blue light soaked through the window behind him; he craned his neck to look towards the place where the sun, when it rose, would rise.

‘...I didn’t dream you asking about the blizzard,’ Will said finally, turning.

‘No,’ Hannibal said, ‘you’ve stopped dreaming,’ and he let the fallboard down.

‘I remember, then, waking up,’ Will said, ‘and thinking for a minute that neither of us would get out. The snow wouldn’t melt. We would eat everything you had, and then we would waste away. I thought that because I was so sick I had forgotten about time. I moved in and out of it so fluidly that it stopped being real to me. So any morning could have been the rest of my life. Or it could have been a room I could never unlock.’

‘You won’t be able to unlock this room,’ Hannibal said, ‘after you leave it. But you’ll remember.’

‘Is the snow melting?’ Will asked.

‘There are icicles still hanging from the eaves,’ Hannibal said. ‘They’re dripping.’

Lifting himself, setting his jaw, Will said, ‘I want to wash.’

 

* * *

 

For a long while the taps groaned and creaked, and ran cold. Will stood naked, resting against the counter, putting his weight on one leg. Hannibal thought the gleam of sweat and blood on his skin looked like aged varnish, and then he thought it looked like sweat and blood. The blood on Will’s mouth and down the side of his face had gone brown; some fresher red seeped through the bandages on his forehead and shoulder. On his stomach, above the dark diamond of pubic hair, his scar shone white, as if purified.

‘There are people,’ Will said when he saw Hannibal looking, ‘who have been in much worse pain. Think of Georgia Madchen burning, or Roland Umber waking to find he’d been sewn into the eye of God.’

Hannibal thought of the stench of unwashed wounds, and the roar of the bathwater into the basin. Steam was rising from the water; the mirror behind Will had clouded, so that when Hannibal looked into it he saw two shadows in the mist. He stepped forward just slightly so that their shadows merged.

‘What one feels cannot be quantified and compared,’ Hannibal said, ‘especially when what one feels is pain. There is infinite variation in feeling, there is infinite variation in pain; that is why we understand each other so little.’

‘I understand you,’ Will said dully. ‘I know you want to touch me. ...  Do I want you to touch me, Hannibal? Do you know enough of me to tell me that?’

‘You want me to absolve you,’ Hannibal said. ‘You want me to pronounce you good again, and true. Unalloyed and opaque. But I can grant no absolution.’

‘You can only pronounce your judgment,’ Will said, ‘and exact your punishment. Well, I’ve been through your purgatory. I don’t know what else is left.’

Because he could not do what Will would ask of him, Hannibal touched Will. He placed his hands on Will’s wrists, bruised from Verger’s ties, then on his hips; he pulled his fingertips up Will’s sides, feeling out the tenderest spots, eliciting flinches. How his lashes flickered: eyes a lamp in the storm. How deeply Will must have felt to tremble, to bare his neck and his teeth. With one hand on Will’s stomach, Hannibal put his mouth over Will’s mouth and licked at what was left of Cordell’s blood. It tasted sour, contaminated; Hannibal was glad to taste it, because it was what Will had tasted. He licked up Will’s cheek till he tasted remnants of the blood that had been spilt from his forehead.

If the Questura di Firenze had arrived at the Palazzo Capponi an hour later, parts of Will’s frontal and parietal lobes would be in Hannibal’s guts. The body Hannibal held—the pulsing body, the clutching throat, the flushing face—would be cleaved apart, malleable, above all knowable. But what was the use of knowing the knowable? Hannibal wanted Will’s infinite mind.

Weakly Will curled his fingers against the back of Hannibal’s neck. He leant forward to lick the blood from Hannibal’s face in turn; he pressed his tongue and teeth to the scab on Hannibal’s lip till the wound split open again. From the split came the rush of fresh scent, the iron. Will spit the blood into Hannibal’s mouth; Hannibal rolled his tongue, he pursed his lips, he swallowed.

‘It’s just blood,’ Will said, smoothing his tongue over his stained lips, baring his stained teeth in a grimace. ‘You think it has power: you think that when a person exercises power, they possess it. You think it matters to consume, to be consumed. Do you know what would have happened if you had eaten me?’

‘What would have happened, Will?’

Will said, ‘I would be dead.’

‘The water is running hot,’ Hannibal said.

He knelt by the bathtub to dip his hand into the water, and then to turn the tap shut. The last of the stream dribbled from the faucet. The bathwater lay still and reflective, trembling almost to the brim; steam rose from it thickly, like cold air blooming from a freezer.

Will lowered himself into the steam; he slipped down till his head sunk beneath the water and escaping bubbles marbled the surface above his face. Blood spiralled upwards, dirt sloughed from his skin. When his face broke through the water, Hannibal lifted him up by his good shoulder and began to scrub him clean. To attend to Will’s wounds made Hannibal aware of his own: he felt keenly the ache in his heel, the blistering on his back, and took comfort in knowing that their pain, however unalike, bound them together.

Will took his own sort of comfort. His head lolled back until his hair floated, weightless, in the pink water; his irises went still beneath his heavy eyelids. He clutched Hannibal’s forearm as if to keep himself afloat; or perhaps only to remind himself that Hannibal, too, bore scars irreparable.

After Will finished his bath, Hannibal let the water out. Then he filled the basin freshly and dissolved Epsom salts into the water, so that when he bathed, the brand on his back would begin to heal. If Will preferred Hannibal keep the scar, he could brand Hannibal again.

 

* * *

 

The dawn broke. Hannibal watched it from the kitchen, where he heated the single can of soup left in Will’s cupboard.

In Will’s absence, he saw, the mice had been chewing through the wood, burrowing into the boxes of dog treats, leaving their droppings on the dusty floor. Dead flies were trapped between the windowpanes. Cobwebs fuzzed the spaces between objects. Water dripped from the ceiling, soaking a dark stain into the kitchen table. The remnants of muddy footprints, months old by now, tracked from the corridor to the back door, then disappeared. Hannibal felt he had entered a place to which he was not meant to return. Will was equally unwelcome; when he unmoored from the harbor at Norfolk he had as good as crossed from one shore to the other.

When Hannibal returned to the front room Will was glowing, warm, gathered up in the blankets. The red, rising sun slotted through the window behind his bed and encased him. Hannibal’s footsteps creaked and fitfully Will stirred.

‘You brought me something like this,’ Will said, taking the bowl in his two hands, ‘after you sent Abel Gideon to kill Alana and let me run after him.’

‘No,’ Hannibal said, ‘what I gave you then was nothing like this. This is salt and chicken stock in water.’ He smiled.

‘Aren’t you going to eat, Hannibal? Or did Mason Verger stuff you full enough?’

‘He never forced me to eat slop, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Is that why he never got around to killing you?’

Like a child, Will brought a spoonful to his mouth and sipped delicately. He shook; the soup dripped from the spoon, splashing onto the flannel Hannibal had buttoned him into. His teeth clicked against stainless steel.

This, Hannibal thought, this labor, this regression, was not mere grasping towards survival. Will chose to take the soup into his mouth, to swallow, as consciously as he had chosen to bite into Hannibal’s wound. He looked at what was before him and he saw sustenance. He put the life in his belly and he lived.

 

* * *

 

And so he did when he pulled Hannibal into his bed and kissed him. They were beyond desire, then; beyond survival. They sought each other because they sought to remember: to know again, as they knew before, the weight and wet pull of their mouths, the press of bone into flesh. So much they had had of bullets, of brands, of blades and stitches; why not hands in equal measure, why not mouths without bared teeth? Why once before, and not again?

Will pulled his fingers through the hair at the nape of Hannibal’s neck. With his cheek sealed to Hannibal’s cheek, he gasped, he shuddered as violently as he did when sitting at Hannibal’s dining room table, pleading Hannibal not to lie to him. He took hold of Hannibal’s flank and turned him onto his back, so that he could rest his hips, with his hard cock between them, in the cradle of Hannibal’s thighs.

Hannibal rocked him, soothingly. He slid his palm down Will’s wet curls and savored the scent, clean and unclean both.

‘When we first did this,’ Will whispered, putting his mouth to Hannibal’s ear, ‘I wasn’t frightened of you. Then I learned to be.’

Hannibal said, ‘You were frightened that if you knew me, you would know we were alike. … What have you learned since then?’

‘That I know myself,’ Will said, and rocked back so that he knelt between Hannibal’s legs. He pulled Hannibal’s jumper up his abdomen, baring the soft, furred skin, till Hannibal pulled the jumper over his head and let it drop to the mattress beside him.

Critically Will watched the slow inwards, outwards push of Hannibal’s stomach; the bob of Hannibal’s throat, the flaring of Hannibal’s nostrils. He looked at Hannibal almost as he had done when holding a gun to Hannibal’s head. He was swollen with grief, with what he believed was righteousness; but the righteousness in Will was as dead as his child in the womb of the sow.

‘What are you going to do to me, Will?’ Hannibal asked.

‘Nothing I haven’t done already,’ Will said. ‘Then again I don’t know if you know what I’ve done to you.’

‘I’ve felt it all,’ Hannibal said.

‘Yes, I know what you’ve felt.’

Hannibal felt the scratch and caress of Will’s hands along the lower curve of his stomach, unfastening his flies; he felt the wash of Will’s breath on his bare skin as he pulled his trousers away. There was such gratification, such contentment, in being naked before Will: Hannibal knew he was seen, and that he was designed upon. Will would take his part in Hannibal’s breathing, his moving, his onwards-going, perhaps after all his shattering.

‘Turn over,’ Will said, and Hannibal turned.

The pillow upon which he rested his cheek had taken in years of Will’s scent: Will’s oils, Will’s semen, had been smeared across the fabric, Will’s skin and hair was caught between the threads. Hannibal opened his mouth, so that when Will pressed himself down against Hannibal’s bandaged back, the pillow rubbed along his lips and tongue. He had been here before, not long after he and Will had become Abigail’s fathers: rain had been falling then, and Hannibal let Will weigh him into the mattress and fuck him from behind, sob into his shoulder. Hannibal had believed then that the only way to let Will into himself was to allow him to drown in his madness. Even then Will had been soaked with the sweat of the fever.

The sweat now, as Will covered his face in Hannibal’s neck and fucked between his thighs, was the sweat of exertion, of consciousness. Will had only to falter, to let his hands slip on the mattress, before he was moving again, rolling his hips, crying out in some atavistic pre-language: the language of the heart, bound by the syntax of the bloody hands.

Words emerged: ‘Hannibal,’ Will said, ‘Hannibal, I’m not going to kill you.’

‘I know,’ Hannibal said, so quietly that the noise might have been the creak of the bedsprings, the sweep of skin along linen.

‘I’m not going to turn you in.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m not going to go away with you.’

With that the words disintegrated. Will choked, he quivered; his elbows gave way, and with his chest pressed to Hannibal’s back, scraping through the bandages at the charred circle of flesh, he rocked his hips till he went, for a long moment, still: whereupon he fell. Falling was a gesture native to Will: he carried it out with all the grace of Lucifer falling backwards into paradise.

‘I never said I was going away,’ Hannibal said. He lay on his side, facing Will, and tucked a curl of Will’s hair behind his ear. He stroked Will’s cheek as softly as he stroked the scarring on the side of their daughter’s face, where her ear had been before Hannibal gave her a knife and asked her whether she understood sacrifice.

Will reached for Hannibal’s cock only to falter when he found that it was softening. He cupped it in his palm, then smoothed his hand along Hannibal’s hip. Between his thighs, Hannibal felt Will’s sweat and semen clinging wetly to his skin. The scent was so strong he salivated; he leant forward to kiss Will, and felt Will’s hand curl into the crevice between his legs, smearing the fluids across the insides of his thighs.

When Will put his glistening fingers to Hannibal’s lips, Hannibal opened his mouth and luxuriated in sucking the glisten away. With his tongue he felt out the knuckles Will had bloodied when he killed Randall Tier; he licked along the fingertips that had been dyed by the blood from Abigail’s carotid. It occurred to Hannibal that Will must have thought he was in some way being cleansed.

No, thought Hannibal, releasing Will’s fingers, kissing Will’s mouth. Will remembered, still, the color of his fingertips dyed, the sting of his knuckles bloodied: that was enough.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal hadn’t lied to Will: icicles hung from the eaves of the porch, dripping as slowly as honey. With his bare hands on the railing, Hannibal looked up and saw how the rising sun made prisms of the ice; how the field before him blazed with reflected light.

Bright beads of water gathered at the tips of the icicles, swelling until they broke loose and splashed. Hannibal thought of the drip, drip, drip of the faucet in the bath of the Palazzo. A bead wet his nose; he thought of the rain cleaning the blood from his upturned face, soaking the blood into his pale striped shirt. He thought of raindrops glittering among shards of glass.

All this he would keep with him; and the sight of the dark house uncovered by the headlamps of the stolen car; and the late summer sunset slicing through the balusters; and Will, young and adrift, sitting on the front steps, whittling a piece of wood with his father’s penknife. He would keep with him even the click of the dogs’ paws, the fishing fly beneath the magnifying glass, the first notes of  _The Rite of Spring_. These sensations he would remake for himself within the confines of his cell in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

But to remake was not to return. Hannibal tipped his head back and waited for the droplets of water to fall upwards, into the ice; still the water dripped, and dripped. Still the sun rose higher. In time the sun would set, the snow would melt, the grass would grow.

 

* * *

 

‘You know what will happen,’ Will said, ‘if you stay. You knew what you were doing when you took me here. It wasn’t that you wanted to bring me home.’

Lying on his back, watching a slant of sunlight move slowly across the stains on the ceiling, Will looked determinedly devout. His dark eyes were unmoving; his hands were laced and folded across his chest. Superimposed over Will’s body were the hundreds of Wills who had lain there before: Will dreaming, soaked and shaking; Will naked and gathered in the threadbare linen; Will serious, sane, thumbing through a 19th-century edition of  _The Compleat Angler_.

Of all those bodies Hannibal loved the newest most. From where he lay, curled into the sliver of the mattress Will had left empty, he felt its warmth and motion. He reached forward, through the hundred visions, and placed his hand over Will’s, rubbing together the bandages covering the wounds from their bindings.

‘I considered each contingency,’ Hannibal said, ‘and I came to the conclusion that after I brought you here I would stay.’

‘You tried to kill me because you thought I would take your freedom,’ Will said drily.

Hannibal put his palm over the swell of stomach where Will’s scar lay. He said, ‘I valued my freedom, then, above all else. You’ve taught me, since, that I value also constancy, and knowledge.’

‘You understand what I said, that night, about having changed you.’

‘Nothing has changed,’ Hannibal said. ‘You and I, we are just what we always were.’

‘Aren’t we,’ Will said, and heaved himself onto his good side. He leant forward and pressed his gauze-bound forehead to Hannibal’s chest. His hot breath bloomed against the fabric of Hannibal’s jumper. ‘If you had eaten me, would we have been the same?’

‘In a sense,’ Hannibal said.

Will’s eyes were closed and his voice sleep-hoarse when he said, ‘There was a moment, when I was dying. There was a moment when the teacup came back together. The blood went into Abigail’s throat; the knife came out of it, and left it clean; and my guts sealed up. And then you were only holding my cheek. And then I was in your office, and you were tossing down your notes, and I was telling you I would run with you. … Then it all unspooled again, and I was lying on the floor of your kitchen, holding my stomach to try to keep my guts in; and Abigail was dead beside me, and I knew—’

‘You saw.’

‘I saw—’

Outside, the melting snow trickled hollowly through the downspouts. The wind smoothed over the snowy field. Cardinals and robins called; woodpeckers tapped at dead limbs.

Hannibal took Will’s cheek in his hand, just as he had done the night he gutted Will. Impulsively, Will turned his face into Hannibal’s palm; he lifted his head just enough to catch Hannibal’s mouth with his own. Then his throat clutched, his hand grasped at Hannibal’s side. Hannibal did nothing: he opened his mouth and let Will plunge into it. How the body, speechless, sung: and the song sweet as the cardinals’.

When Will had exhausted himself he rested with his forehead against Hannibal’s. His lips brushed against the side of Hannibal’s mouth; Hannibal felt Will’s breath, the opening and closing of his mouth, as he said, ‘I know you’re going to try to kill me again.’

‘Yes,’ Hannibal said, murmuring into Will’s mouth, ‘but not for a long time yet.’

 

* * *

 

Snow was falling by the time the sun had set. There was no more trickling in the downspout, no more dripping from the eaves; wind wailed through the gaps around the windows and the doors. Hannibal, standing before the left front window, watched the field lighten and darken as clouds passed across the moon. The telephone he held to his ear was ringing.

‘Tell me you made it out of there,’ Jack said.

Hannibal said, ‘We did,’ whereupon there was silence, static.

Carefully, as if spitting out words he had chewed seven times over, Jack said, ‘Is Will with you?’

‘Alive and well-tended. One might say healing; and not purely in a physical sense.’

‘Let me speak to him, then.’

‘He’s sleeping,’ Hannibal said, glancing over his shoulder. The room was dark but for the lamp by Will’s bedside; the dim light revealed Will in chiaroscuro, hunched and shifting, scratching his own work alongside the equations Hannibal had left unfinished. ‘I think it would be unwise to wake him.’

‘We’ll wake him when we get there,’ Jack said. ‘I trust you’re going to leave him where he is.’

‘If he chooses to go, I won’t keep him. But I doubt he will choose to go. … You and I will see each other presently, Jack, so I won’t say goodbye to you now. Perhaps  _a presto_.’

Then Hannibal and Will were alone; but their solitude, like any other ancient thing, was crumbling. The world without was crushing inwards, shattering the long empty spaces through which they had travelled. They had reached the farthest corners of their companionship: now they were drawn back irresistibly to the genesis. Hannibal was washing the blood from Will’s knuckles; Will was holding a gun to Hannibal’s head. They were split by the bars of Will’s cell; they were in each others’ arms; they were clutching together at Abigail’s bleeding neck. They were sitting in Jack Crawford’s office, side-by-side: Hannibal was looking at Will, and Will was refusing to look back.

Then it all unspooled again, and Hannibal was sitting on the edge of Will’s bed, reading what Will had written; and Will was leaning back against the pillow, looking up.

From somewhere within the deepest chambers of the palace, Hannibal heard the echoes of the aria’s first notes. Now it was the  _aria da capo_. The notes repeated: silence, music, then silence, then music.  _Thrum, thrum, thrum, thrum._  The rhythm was that of the heart or the lungs, the sonnet, the pendulum swinging.

 

* * *

 

As Hannibal knelt, the snow soaked into the knees of his trousers. He felt, in the asphalt, the thrumming of the cars’ engines; the tapping of a dozen footsteps; the tears in his eyes. Beneath those nearer things he felt the silence, the music, the silence.

Flakes swirled into the headlights; wind pulled through his hair, and stung the cuts on his face. With his hands behind his head, Hannibal glanced back, knowing he ought not to have glanced back, and saw Will standing on the front porch, his hands by his sides. No blade glinted from Will’s palm: such was this forgiveness. He watched as the cuffs were locked around Hannibal’s wrists.

When was it, Hannibal asked himself, that he had felt such wind on his face, such snow on his skin? There was a time, he thought, when he stood at the crest of a hill, clutched a warm body to his own, and said, ‘Hold on, hold on tight.’ Silently he formed his lips around the words: ‘Hold on, hold….’ He remembered holding against his chest the soft, delicate head of someone he loved. Now he was being pulled to his feet and marched forward.

‘If I’m not among the cells of the BHSCI,’ Hannibal told Will, ‘look in the ice. The devil will be holding my hands in his fourth mouth: you know why.’

‘I know where I can find you,’ Will called down. ‘I don’t know that I’ll try.’

Hannibal, smiling, said, ‘You will.’

Before he lost sight of the house, Hannibal thought that with its windows lighted it looked like a boat on the ocean, shored up against the dark. Imperceptibly the space between him and the house began to swell, just as a boat in the distance bobs towards the horizon.

Will, on the porch, was safe. He stood between the two windows like a pier-glass, and Hannibal saw in him the image of himself absolved: but that was an image like any other, like the image of Will lying on his back and watching the sun move across the ceiling. Hannibal was turned away, and the screen door creaked closed. Beyond the headlamps of the surrounding cars Hannibal saw an ocean of ice, bright and variegated, immobile; he saw the dark wood, the bare branches; he saw Chiyoh in a patch of moonlight, turning; and beyond the wood, the stars.

 

* * *

 


End file.
